There is a standard version of what a legal career looks like: join a firm, work in teams, progress through a structure that someone else has built. Most barristers inhabit a different version entirely. Emily Windsor, a chancery barrister who has served as a Judge, has examined that difference with the honesty of someone who values both sides of the picture.
Windsor’s practice spans advising clients, preparing cases, and appearing in court. Her client base is broad — agricultural businesses in the north of England alongside companies recognisable from everyday commerce — and the range of legal matters that brings with it is something she finds genuinely sustaining. The work is intellectually demanding and practically varied, and that combination holds her interest.
The structure of that work is self-employment within Chambers. Windsor regards this model with real appreciation. Running an independent practice means she is not managed, not constrained by a firm’s internal pressures, and free to organise her professional life according to her own priorities. Chambers provides the surrounding community: colleagues who are available for advice, a shared working environment, and the kind of professional relationships that make independent practice sustainable rather than solitary.
Windsor does not understate what the model demands in return. Taking personal responsibility for your own practice means carrying that practice fully. At the Bar, most barristers work through their cases individually — teams exist in some forms, but the default is a single practitioner responsible for the matter at hand. Windsor reflects that this responsibility does not end with the working day. She thinks about her clients outside office hours more than she probably should — evenings, weekends, the hours between other things. The accountability that comes with independence is, she acknowledges, a weight that sits with you.
The pace of practice has also changed over her career in ways that have added to that pressure. Written correspondence once moved at a tempo that allowed time for considered replies. Email removed that buffer. Responses are now expected more quickly, and barristers — operating independently, without support staff to filter communications — feel that expectation directly.
Technology has also, however, changed what self-employment can look like in practice. Legal resources that previously required physical access to a library are now available from a laptop at home, at any hour. Working remotely for extended periods is now genuinely viable for a practitioner who needs to. Windsor regards this as a meaningful development — particularly for anyone managing responsibilities outside their professional life.
Her overall verdict on the self-employed Bar is positive and clear. She loves the people, the variety, and the energy of court. When retirement came up in conversation, she struggled to identify a good reason for it. That, perhaps, is the most direct assessment of what a career at the Bar can offer.